LAS CENTRE IDENTITIES AND
PRACTICES WITHIN HIGHER
EDUCATION: FRAGMENTS FOR
NEGOTIATION
Gavin Melles
Faculty of Education, Deakin University and
Centre for Communication Skills and ESOL
University of Melbourne
Gmelles@unimelb.edu.au
The teaching of language and academic skills is diffused across higher
education institutions and is not uniquely located in LAS. This means that
a discussion about identities and futures of 'LAS' in times of change is
itself problematic. Likewise, the discourses around centre identities within
faculties, the role of technology and the web, and responses to an
increasingly diverse student body float across institutions with no
privileged convergence on LAS. So it is necessary first to acknowledge
that 'our' identity is still very much open to negotiation and contestation
and
that
the
institutional
fragmentation
of
LAS
practices
has
consequences for a workable identity and a coherent response to times of
change. I use a recent shift from New Zealand to Australia, some poststructural scaffolding, and current representations of practices and
discourses to try to locate some responses to these questions and their
implications for professional identities, practices, and organisation within
institutions.
Language and Academic Skills: an abstract reading
"As we enter the 21st century, universities are experiencing a
period
of
unprecedented
transformation:
globalisation,
corporatisation, internationalisation, increased accountability,
restructuring and new technologies are among the forces
reshaping our institutions. The one constant is change and
inherent in this is our changing identities as we grapple with the
new demands we encounter daily. These external forces, in
combination with developments in our field and related
disciplines, cannot fail to impact on our identities as LAS staff
within our institutions, on the identities of our students and on
the identities of our academic colleagues.
"The point is that it is you that is doing the identifying, and the
identity you confer has more to do with your purposes than the
'nature' of the thing itself...masculinity / femininity, hetero- /
homosexual, sane/insane...these may be seen as socially
bestowed identities rather than essences of the person" (Burr,
1995, p.30)
It seems to me that one of the functions of conferences is to reinforce professional
'solidarity' and recognize disciplinary boundaries through mutual display and
conversation. As many of the papers at the abstracts and papers at this conference
indicate there is a wide variety of professional positions available to conference
participants in situating their response to the question of identities. In the spirit of
'mutual' display and conversation, I would like you to think of my discussion as a
continuation of the conversation Carolyn Webb initiated at her plenary. In particular, I
am interested in developing the question of research approaches to LAS,
appropriate pedagogical philosophies for practitioners, and, in general, a questioning
of the language and practices assumed to structure this field. A 'workable'
description of LAS staff, our field, our students, is assumed by the conference
abstract. I suggest that the 'our' community is far from well-defined.
The conference abstract and title works against efforts to stabilize or describe new
identities for language and academic skills practitioners. Just as students do (Bartlett
2000), we come to teaching with diverse backgrounds but unlike them there is no
single 'Australian (LAS) identity' to which we can or must conform (Yew & Farrell,
2000). I think if we move beyond the 'LAS' acronym we can begin to see that this
question of identities is one that links to the work of a broad group of people
mediating a new higher education curriculum. Like Clarke (2000), I see myself
involved in advising students on issues that go beyond the mechanics of writing into
content and research methodologies. I think the fact that this happens shows that
'we' are no longer involved in fix-it remediation or support but substantially involved
in the process of re-defining the tertiary currciulum (Tapper 1999; Aitchison 2000).
I see my own role as a lecturer in ESL within a communication skills and ESL centre
at Melbourne University, along with my colleagues, as intersecting with and
subsuming, in some instances, the teaching activities of those who identify
themselves as LAS staff. The work of staff in transition programmes, foundation
studies programmes, and other units across the campus are all concerned with
researching and teaching staff and students what is required for academic
acculturation. I think that rather than providing help with 'supporting' skills we need to
think about what we do as work in academic literacies; a professional research and
teaching space with its own content and purposes. And we need to widen linkages
and contacts with those concerned with these issues. This implies leaving behind the
peripheral 'support' tag used to define what LAS is and grasping at academic
literacies as a professional research and teaching field; one which requires a social
and professional attention to the consequences of what we teach and who we are.
As Vivien Burr points out in the quote above, the identities we confer on others and
those that are conferred on us serve social (and institutional) purposes. We are often
designated into binaries such as: academic/general staff, adviser/lecturer,
external/internal, language/academic skills, skills/literacy; some of these binaries are
implied in the conference description. The designations correspond to historical and
political constructions within education and society but are not particularly useful to
categorise people whose practices are concerned with academic literacy. One way
'us' (LAS) and 'them' (academic colleagues) breaks down is when one looks at those
involved in teaching the literacies required by the academy (Dobson 2000). As this
conference attendance list, profesional associations such as HERSA, AARE, and
professional
forums
like
UNILEARN
attest
such
simplifications
bear
little
resemblance to the designations, locations and concerns of practitioners in the field
who talk about interpreting academic cultures for students.
I must admit to never having worked in a so-called language and academic skills
centre. I have worked in high schools, ESL units, language departments, continuing
education departments and latterly communication skills centres where instruction in
note-taking skills, referencing, time management, and other discretely identified
academic behaviours (the standard agendas for LAS centres I have known) have
formed part of a broader curriculum. Latterly, I have been working with postgraduate
first and second language students on research skills and writing in parallel with
undergraduate ESL 'credit' teaching. This teaching is conducted in on-line, face-toface, workshop, individual and group situations. Students 'skills' in assignment
writing, thesis structuring, referencing, self-management, all form part of 'bigger
pictures'. Overall, then, the skills focus that continues to define some work on
language and academic skills is a somewhat artificial isolation of the mechanics of
curriculum processes.
Situating identities in our past and present
Feminist approaches, I believe, have particular relevance for a field such as teaching
academic literacies which has a strong female representation and works within
largely andro-centric institutional frameworks (Asmar, 1999a; Blackmore & Sachs,
1998; Jackson, 2000) and academic perspectives (Beasley, 1985). Feminist
methodology puts gender, reflexivity, and purposes of research and writing on at the
centre (Harding, 1987). As critical feminist writers like Jones (Jones, 1992), Lather
(Lather, 1991) and Smith (Smith, 1990) suggest texts - research and other - about
experience are ideological by nature. This is true for the discourses of conferences
as it is for research articles on or about practice. When we visit or revisit texts about
teaching, we are not obliged to read them in ways that sustain the illusion they mirror
the
Truth
(Fraser,
1989).
We
can
and
should
interrogate
pragmatically
(Cherryholmes 1993) them as setting up a picture of the world (ontology), of
knowledge (epistemology) and consequences for educational practice (methodology)
that we find ignores personal, gender, and political blind spots and blank spots
(Wagner 1993) we view as critical to what we do.
How we practice teaching is tied up with our sense of awareness of its role and
purpose in education in general. This understanding is both personal and social: it is
a product of our own past practices in institutional contexts. A 'workable' identity for
us as individuals needs to be built on integrating our current understandings of this
as mediated by our own teaching experiences. Increasingly I find that the best kinds
of conversations about teaching practice are those that begin by acknowledging our
personal investment, gender, and other positions we take in the changing climate of
institutional politics we work in. These are conversations we often have in staffrooms
with those we know and who know us. It is worth unpacking in writing, I suggest, the
representations of the institution, ourselves, and others that surface in the close work
we do with students. These 'tales from the field' have something of the power of a
critical tale (Barone 1992). Critical tales use autobiographical strategies to situate
educational understanding and practice and allow political and ethical considerations
to come to the fore. They have a central place in feminist educational research,
which acknowledge that "our accounts of the world can only be constructions, made
up from the language, meanings and ideas historically available to us, the 'I'" (Jones
1992).
Literacy as a socio-historical construction and practice written through critical
feminist approaches invites a 'contextualising' of teaching and a challenge to takenfor granted binaries. It involves writing about our practices from particular positions of
power with regard to students and other academics. The issues we are increasingly
asked to deal with - research methodologies, plagiarism, advising faculty on teaching
practice, are reflections of institutional change. The androcentrics of university
management, the gendered nature of 'support' teaching (more females than males),
the assumptions about student accommodation to anglo-centric models of the
academy, need description in writing as we experience them from our situated
teaching perspectives. One of my views is that the language of 'skills' and 'support'
contributes to the (already) marginal status some of us have in the institution. Writing
'up' the extent to which our interventions are increasingly important for student
success and emphasising literacies as our field are two ways of combatting this.
Why literacies not skills?
Along with others, I am dissatisfied with the term 'skills' as sufficiently well defined
and sufficiently broad to cover the functions assigned to academic acculturation
(Candlin et al. 1998; Richards 1998). 'Academic literacy', is a term that is sometimes
used synonymously with 'measurable' skill levels (Barthel, 1994; Hanrahan, 1997;
Holder, Jones, Robinson, & Krass, 1999; Nevile, 1996; see also Willis, 1990). But
the sense I want to stress here is successful communication in socio-cultural context.
I agree with Percy and Skillen (2000) that the role of learning adviser, or better the
support role in universities is in a period of transition and that this translates, on the
one hand, into moving from outside to inside the curriculum (Percy & Skillen 2000).
For example, faculty construct particular relationships with students through
feedback and increasingly, the role of interpretation or even mediation between
student and university cultures is being played by teachers like myself and those in
LAS and other centres (Jessup 2000). In one sense this is bridging the gap between
faculty and student expectations (Killen 1994). In another, it indicates how the
burden of academic acculturation as a social process is falling to those outside
discipline specific content teachers.
Literacies in plural helps keep the focus on the multiple ways language in context is
represented across campus by faculty and students. In its current use it also keeps
the focus on the social import of literacies for an increasingly diverse student
population (McKay 1993). As such it subsumes 'skills', which often implies a neutral
designation for the 'mechanics' of tertiary success. It is a term which applies in a
cross-disciplinary way to academic literacies across campus and beyond 'support'
roles (Pearce & Borland, 1997; Reid & Mulligan, 1997). Because it has purchase in
all levels of education - primary through tertiary - literacy also helps create a bridge
across cultural and historical circumstances for individual students (and teachers). It
reminds us that academic literacy is only the tip of an individual and group sociohistorical process that begins in early childhood.
Literacies brings into focus the issue of discourse and the academic genres that
students must manage. New undergraduates, coursework Masters students, PhD
students from different backgrounds are all learning to manage the conventions,
sometimes very idiosyncratic, demanded of them by discipline specific faculty. Gone
are the days (the golden 'halcion' past) when they could magically be expected to
have reached academic maturity through a process of osmosis through their many
years in the education system. Internationalisation and accountability have both
played a part in ensuring that the taken for granted simply will not do. The discourses
and practices of the academy need transparent interpretation (if not modification) for
a diverse student body.
Our mainstream 'colleagues' are still grappling with this issue but to a far less extent
than we who have moved into the interpreter and mediator role. I increasingly find
myself explaining the odd somewhat cryptic questions of my academic 'colleagues'
to students. Cryptic because culturally different and sometimes undisclosed. Skills
will not do either as a job designation to explain the role I and others find ourselves
in explaining research methodologies to students in ethnomusicology, critical and
post-modern approaches to law, and educational linguistics. As Percy and Skillen
(2000) noted the shift to learner-centred practices in the modern university is a
serious challenge for some staff and can only be effectively achieved through 'equal'
partnerships between those of us who discipline staff and literacy specialists like
ourselves.
The politics of common sense notions of external/internal forces
Corporatisation, technologisation, internationalisation, globalisation, accountability,
and restructuring can be seen as a constellation of 'common sense' meta-narratives1
(Lyotard, 1984) or 'myths' (Holton, 1997) in education which lecturers, students, and'
advisers never intentionally wrote. As common sense realities they can be positioned
as anonymous2 forces moulding higher education and 'our' community into new
'shapes'. Gramsci's notion of hegemony3 is important here because it helps explain
how we as educators come to accept as common sense notions that serve political,
commercial and industrial ends. They are patently words that those practicing
language and skills training do not own nor coin.
These common sense nominalisations are, in fact, extremely politicized notions
which connect to other issues such as the commodification of higher education
(Roberts, 1998). Curriculum change from an 'international' policy perspective means,
for example, modifying the curriculum to meet global training objectives. From an
equity standpoint it is not clear whether curriculum change is actually working and
whether, therefore the rhetoric of multiculturalism and internationalised curriculum is
having more than financial effects (Dawson, 1998). Language and academic skills
connects to the changing needs of international students (Bostock, 1998). Their
financial input has been good for business and for multiculturalism on campus
(Pittaway, Ferguson, & Breen, 1998). Or at least there is a positive response from
management and administration to internationalisation as a 'given' of corporate
university life with the added attraction of benefits for campus multiculturalism
1
For more on this now standard postmodern term attributed to Jacques Lyotard see 'Introduction to
Basic Lyotardian Concepts' at http://www.california.com/~rathbone/lyo3.htm and 'Notes on JeanFrancois Lyotard' at http://www.california.com/~rathbone/lyotard2.htm.
2
The linguistic tactic of creating a nominalized form such as 'internationalisation' is one of the
strategies used in academic discourse to conceal agency and responsibility. Here, we can ask by
whom?
3
Follow it up in the Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, © Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan
S.Turner (1994) or on-line at http://xrefer.com/entry/105141
(Hampson, 1996). But the multicultural benefits of internationalisation from a
management perspective need to move from rhetorical (Barrie, 1997) to grounded
statements about what is happening in classrooms and departments (Asmar,
1999b).
The effects on curriculum practice are particularly relevant to what we do.
Internationalisation, beyond a management strategy and achievement, is challenging
university staff to respond adequately (Mills, 1997; Rizvi & Walsh, 1998; Tootell,
1999; Welch & Denman, 1997) and, in fact, change their teaching strategies (Baker
& Panko, 1998). Academic skills like the ability to work in groups (Volet & Ang, 1998)
and manage postgraduate study (Stacy, 1999) have taken on special meaning
where they are filtered through different linguistic and cultural expectations. Dialogue
between faculty and students is one way of closing the gap and moving to the
incorporation of different beliefs and behaviours in the classroom (Dawson, 1998).
Internationalisation shows up in threads of conversation on the UNILEARN list. The
unilearn list a Special Interest Group forum of the Higher Education Research and
Development Society Association which canvasses Australasian4 comment and
discussion on language and learning in higher education. I have been talking and
listening to contributors for the last four years. The contributions to the forum
emanate from advisers, support officers, lecturers, and others (with unidentified
positions) within academic skills units, university programs, polytechnics, support
centres, centres and schools of language or ESL and communication within faculties
of Arts, Business, Computing and Mathematics, and centres. In my view, this group
is an important
part of the community whose practices are addressed by this
conference.
What is particularly interesting from the point of view of internationalisation as a
common sense 'given' is how it surfaces in the list conversations as a political cum
rhetorical axis dictating organisation, discourse, and practices of 'our' community. I
list below some of the threads
4
Occasional contributions also come from the UK, Australia, the US, etc.
•
the participation of international students in group work
•
IELTS/TOEFL entry requirements and their credibility for postgraduates and
undergraduates
•
advising academic staff on working with international students
•
teaching academic skills to offshore students
•
plagiarism: how to teach (NESB especially) students not to do it
These ways in which 'internationalised' teaching situations for support staff are linked
to institutional politics is clear in a recent thread on individual tutorials on the list. In
the course of this (asynchronous) conversation talk on individual tutorials is linked to
the following themes: individual tutorials are …
•
used as measures of staff performance and promotion
•
limited by university funding and cost-effectiveness
•
usefully framed by Vygotskian or Rogerian approaches
•
difficult to validate the effectiveness of with faculty management
•
less effective (cost and results) than group work
•
the best kind of teaching and a source of insights and input into group teaching
and research
•
can be achieved through use of senior students as peer teachers/mentors
•
definitive of the separate (non-academic) profile of learning centre staff
•
increasing in number
•
not considered university teaching (for award purposes)
•
needed because faculty don’t do their job properly (and linked to the
disappearance of learning adviser if this situation is remedied)
Textual fundamentalism and naivity in teaching and learning
"Textual fundamentalism is the belief that texts always say just
what they mean, so that any honest or decent person ought to
be able to understand this perfectly clear meaning without
making any fuss about it ". (Scholes, 1989, p.52)
Following Scholes, Richard Rorty, Cleo Cherryholmes and ultimately John Dewey I
have taken a pragmatic rather than a fundamentalist approach to reading the
conference descriptor and abstracts. In doing so I have tried to highlight some of the
assumptions built into the language employed to describe the aims and purposes of
the conference. It is the same approach that Cleo Cherryholmes suggests for
avoiding naïve approaches to reading research in the social sciences and education
(Cherryholmes, 1993). That is, against a 'fundamentalist' or empiricist approach to
reading research that stresses its transparent relationship to Reality and Truth5, we
need to attend to subtexts of gender and politics and read pragmatically,
"Pragmatic readers emphatically deny that facts or narrative
plots or theories or metaphors or statistical explanations or
formal models ever speak for themselves . . . Pragmatists
suggest we clarify the meaning of research by looking to the
consequences of our findings . . . The point is that the
paradoxes,
ambiguities
and
contradictions
that
readers
encounter in their attempts to clarify meanings require that
choices
be
made.
Where
rational,
these
choices
are
pragmatic." (Cherryholmes, 1993, p.3-4).
It is possible to use a similar fundamentalism in the teaching of language and
academic skills, and construct a view of 'LAS' as essentially a transparent field. That
5
The capitals are used to indicate reference to reified historical notions which operate in certain
disciplines; they are not equivalent to 'reality' and 'truth' as debatable labels for untheorized notions.
is, as an identifiable body of practitioners in higher education concerned with
supporting students to succeed in content areas by teaching the mechanics of essay
writing, etc., on the assumption that our academic colleagues define the content for
us.
If like other educationists we want a professional identity (Carr & Kemmis, 1986)
then this approach will not do because it defers the question of what field we own
preferring to leave it to 'content' faculty and our institution to determine this. Talk
about academic 'support' is only possible by viewing (who?) the teaching of
language and academic skills as a practice without a field or as a set of practices in
search of an identity. Since, as I suggest in this paper, there is no generic
geographic location for academic literacies on campuses and since higher education
– adult, vocational, academic, professional -itself is a work in progress, this
contributes to a dispersal of what we do. Our teaching practices as interpreters,
mediators, researchers, and academics in the field of academic literacies take place
as 'micro' instances of power/knowledge representations or discourses (Foucault,
1988) that define institutionalised education. The higher education curriculum is
changing and increasingly 'we' stand at the crossroads of this change. Negotiating
the changes will mean broadening our networks as we move from outside to inside
the higher education curriculum.
Appendix: table of designations of 'support' staff from UNILEARN
by-lines
Director, Learning Centre
Lecturer in English as a second
Head, Academic Skills Program
language, Teaching & Learning
Centre
Teaching and Learning Services
Business
Communication
Skills
(NESB)
Staff
chair:
campus
gender
policies and practices forum,
Department
of
Academic
Development (AD)
Lecturer, Learning Centre
Learning & Language Adviser,
Teaching and Learning Support
The Learning Centre
Officer
Senior
Lecturer
School
of
Languages
Co-ordinator,
Intercultural
Communication 141/142 units
Lecturer
in
English
Communication,
Skills
Academic
Program,
Language,
School
Literature
of
and
Communication
Coordinator:
Learning
Teaching
Services,
and
Learning
Connection - Flexible Learning
Coordinator, Academic Support
Lecturer,
Unit,
Learning
Development
Learning
Lecurer in Tertiary Teaching and
Teaching
and
Learning
Centre
Centre
Associate
Professor,
Student
Learning
Head,
section,
Learning
Adviser,
Learning, Teaching and Learning
Assistance Unit
Development Unit
Teaching and Learning Centre
Lecturer & Subject Convenor.
Learning Support, Maia - Maori
Director and Senior Lecturer,
English
Development Centre
English
for
International
Language
Assistance
&
Study
Business, School of Languages
Skills
(ELSSA)
and Linguistics
Centre, Faculty of Humanities
and Social Sciences
Academic Coordinator, English
Head, The Learning Centre
Lecturer,
Language Centre
Learning
Development
Lecturer in Literacy, Office of the
Head, Student Welfare Services
Academic Skills Program
Learning Skills Lecturer, Learning
ESL
Skills Unit, Student Services
Communication Skills and ESL
Dean of Students
Academic Skills Coordinator
School
of
Mathematics
Computing
and
Lecturer,
Academic
Skills
Humanities Academic Skills Unit
Lecturer,
Effective
Student
Division
Centre
Learning
and
Staff
for
Adviser,
Support
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